My Week: I’m not yet ready for celibacy

Wednesday11 a.m.
While standing in line at the grocery checkout counter, I hear that song by Sting, Englishman in New York, and I actually begin to tear up. I imagine him, that poor Englishman, walking around in his frock coat and cravat, looking for bangers and mash, asking for the loo and only getting bewildered stares. Just awful.

11:02 a.m.
While waiting, I grab a magazine off the rack and read an article about monkeys. It seems the bonobo, our closest genetic relative, is on the brink of extinction. This despite the fact they’re said to be having sex every few minutes.
I wonder if there are some monkeys in the zoo who enjoy being watched having monkey sex while others just grit their teeth and make do.

“Is that a part of your order?” she asks, pointing to the bag of walnuts I’m carrying.

“No,” I say. “I came in here with them.”

“Gotcha,” she says. She looks up at me and smiles.

When I was younger and leaving a store, I’d always worry that the alarm might go off. This in spite of never stealing anything. I just always felt guilty somehow, like there was something about merely being alive that was slightly embarrassing, if not criminal.

But since entering my 40s, I move about with greater confidence and ease. The world gives me the benefit of a doubt, probably because I seem pretty non-threatening — like a hamster in his winter years.

And so I now do things like lean into the concierge’s ear and ask whether the hotel breakfast is complimentary. I do it as though we are co-conspirators and he has a vested interest in my getting free bacon. When passing a crowded summer terrace downtown I’ll boldly call out to someone drinking sangria, “You’ve got the right idea!” Airport employees treat me better and grocery store clerks assume I’m not trying to rob their store of nuts. Not a bad recompense for losing your hair and having pop-cultural savvy.

11:05 a.m.
“That’s a lot of yogurt you’ve got there,” the cashier says, ringing up the last of my items.

“I’m a lot of man,” I say, handing her my cash.

Another wonderful benefit of age is having a wider range of attractions. You see the beauty of the 50-ish grocery clerk in a way you couldn’t have when you were younger. You see in her all of her ages at once — the coquettishness of 20 and the cocksure cool of 30. You see the woman in her 40s who uncovers surprising pockets of attractiveness she may well have thought lost. Seeing it all feels like having acquired a new kind of depth perception.

Before leaving, I throw a full dime into the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray. It seems like the kind of thing an Englishman in Montreal might do. And if I’m not mistaken, the cashier seems impressed, which feels nice because, after all, I’m not ready for celibacy quite yet.